Mark Wahlberg

In “The Review Revue,” we turn dozens of movie reviews from all over the Internet into one handy blog post. It’s like super-concentrated orange juice for film criticism (with less pulp and Vitamin D). This week: we steal some critical perspective on CONTRABAND.

2012′s surprisingly strong start at the box office continued last weekend with CONTRABAND, which earned — or, I guess in this case, counterfeited — an estimated $28.8 million from Friday to Monday, making it one of star Mark Wahlberg’s strongest openings ever. But did CONTRABAND deserve that massive monetary haul? Or did it rip off its customers the way Wahlberg’s character rips off a priceless Jackson Pollock painting? (More on that later.) Let’s find out.

We gays have icons that sometimes become huge stars, the Gagas and the Madonnas. But we also have more obscure icons, those that the general public could never embrace the way we did. Loleatta Holloway was one of those icons.

Her voice was big. Really big. And she too was no small lady. Her “Crash Goes Love” still makes my skin crawl and her “Love Sensation” is just so, so, so good. It is a record that defines that late 70s/early 80s disco meets house sound. It holds up to this day.

Technically speaking, THE FIGHTER, the character director David O. Russell named his film after, is Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), an aging boxer badly managed by his mother, Alice, and sporadically coached by his crack addict, ex-boxer brother Dicky (Christian Bale), but given what actually gets the most screen time an alternate title could be “watch Christian Bale act like a drug addict for two hours.”